Learning to write Chinese characters by hand is time-consuming. If you don’t need to write beautifully or quickly, but still want to be able to write by hand, you need a solid strategy. In this article, I offer my minimum-effort approach to learning to write Chinese characters by hand. It involves reading, typing, spaced repetition and communicative writing.

Listening to enough Chinese is difficult because it’s hard to find and manage the right amount of audio. One of the key points to success is to make sure you have enough easy audio available. This article discusses the importance of adjusting your audio to your current state of mind.

Listening to enough Chinese audio isn’t easy. It requires you to find suitable audio in large quantities as well as to make that audio easily accessible wherever you are. That’s not enough, though, you also need to be able to keep this up for weeks, months and years, and that’s where the real challenge is. This article is meant to help you listen to as much Chinese audio as you should.

What you intend to write is more important that what you actually write. With the right intent, more practice will take you far, but with the wrong intent, no amount of practice will help. Fortunately, a small mental trick can help you learn to write characters more effectively.

Achieving native-like pronunciation in a foreign language as an adult learner isn’t easy. The strategy to get there needs to incorporate large amounts of practice, mimicking and feedback, but I’m convinced that we can also benefit from a small portion of theoretical knowledge. Pronunciation theory can, among other things, help us notice details we did know about before.

In this article, I list 24 great resources for learning pronunciation. Naturally, some of them are limited to Mandarin Chinese, but many are more general in nature and works for other Chinese dialects or even other languages. Resources are sorted into Basic sound references, Pronunciation explained, Advice on learning pronunciation and Useful software and applications.

Finding a suitable Chinese name can be hard. If you care about your name, you should make an effort to find a good one rather than accepting what’s given to you. This article is about names in general, how to choose a name (and how not to), as well as my own personal story about my own Chinese name.

Instead of worrying too much about Pinyin spelling and what sounds each letter represents, students of Mandarin should zoom out a bit and focus on initials and finals as whole units. There are only around 60 of them and focusing on them will pay off handsomely.

When learning Chinese, it’s important to know how good your best performance is, because this determines the way you study. If your best performance is good enough, you mostly need high-volume practice, more of the same will get you there. But if your best performance isn’t good enough, you need to change tactics and go for high-quality practice instead.